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We’re thankful for water flowing 24/7/365

11/01/18

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Day or night, holiday or weekday, crews are on tap to fix water main breaks.

This Thanksgiving, we’re giving thanks for the crews who keep our drinking water flowing day in and day out.

Ensuring 1.4 million people receive high-quality drinking water is a nonstop operation. Here’s a glimpse at what some of our employees do on holidays — and every day — to make sure our customers have the water they need.

Emergencies

Denver Water’s central dispatch takes calls from people reporting main breaks all day and night. Pipes can break at all hours of the day, and we must be ready to respond. The central dispatch team works like a police or fire department dispatch center to coordinate response so we can minimize the impact on our customers.

Even in the dark, members of the Emergency Services team are Denver Water’s first responders. They handle anything from shutting off water so crews can repair pipe breaks, to supporting Denver firefighters during multi-alarm blazes, to assisting customers with water quality complaints.

After Emergency Services responds to a call, a Water Distribution crew fixes the problem so customers can have water service restored as soon as possible.

Water treatment

Our drinking water plants are staffed around the clock by operators and maintenance personnel who monitor the treatment processes and run lab tests to ensure the water we deliver (sometimes at the rate of 350,000 gallons a minute) meets all federal and state regulations, and even tighter Denver Water standards.

Distribution

Distribution operators work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, scanning various computer screens to make sure our 30 treated water reservoirs, more than 3,000 miles of pipe, 140 pressure zones and 23 pump stations are ready for the morning load as our customers wake and prepare for their day.

We provide customers an average of 64 billion gallons of high-quality drinking water and 2 billion gallons of treated recycled water every year. No small task, but it’s all in a day’s work at Denver Water.